Behavioral, cognitive, affective, and motivational dimensions of academic procrastination among community college students.

Presented as Joanna Sokolowska.

Academic procrastination, a multifaceted phenomenon with cognitive, affective, and motivational dimensions, affects most if not all students.  Although research on academic procrastination among college students is plentiful, only a handful of studies have investigated community college students’ procrastination. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to fill this gap in the literature.

            Participants included 53 community college students representing mainly ethnic minorities and first generation immigrants.  U sing Q-methodology and structured interviews, participants were asked to discuss the relative contributions of dispositional (i.e., perfectionism, fear of failure), motivational (i.e., values, goal orientations, self-efficacy), and self-regulatory (e.g., effort regulation, time management) constructs in explaining their procrastinating tendencies.

            This study found relatively high rates of procrastination, where even non-procrastinators were found to engage in this dilatory behavior.  The reasons ranged from task avoidance to active regulation of procrastination and were mostly cognitive and motivational in nature.  These reasons were also contextually-based and mostly maladaptive. Based on the inverted factor analysis of Q methodology results, five different profiles of procrastination were identified including: the Self-doubters, the Lazy Regulators, the Active Procrastinators, the Jugglers, and the Perfectionists.

            The results of this study generally confirm that procrastination is a multifaceted phenomenon that is often dictated by the nature of task.  Community college students are as eager as their senior college counterparts to engage in procrastination, however due to many non-academic responsibilities they need to juggle, not all reasons are due to lack of self-regulation of learning.